Data as of 2026-11-01 · updated 2026-11-01
The box is open. Is your job still inside?
We read 118,545 archived job ads, most from eight Southeast Asian countries, from 2019 to 2026, and the full text of 106,532 of them. One job shrank on every board. A phone app became the entry ticket. And for most Indonesian jobs the AI wave has not reached the ads at all, yet. Find your job below.
Pick your job. See what the ads now demand.
Every number below comes from the ads themselves, before ChatGPT (to October 2022) against after (from January 2023).
Admin
Growing- TikTok 0.7% → 6.8%
- Google Sheets 1.1% → 6.7%
- ERP / SAP / Accurate 5.6% → 10.1%
- Canva 0.5% → 3.4%
Your move: Still hiring: up from 4.8% to 6.7% of ads on the biggest office board. The bar moved to the cloud and the shop floor: Google Sheets went from 1.1% to 6.7% of admin ads, ERP and accounting software from 5.6% to 10.1%, and 6.8% now mention TikTok. Admin now runs the online shop too.
Myth check: is Indonesia last in Southeast Asia on AI?
Raw totals say so: 0.31% of Indonesian ads since ChatGPT ask for AI, against 3.71% in Malaysia. But different countries are archived from different boards. On the one board we read in both Indonesia and the Philippines, it is 1.06% in Indonesia and 0.77% in the Philippines. Like for like, Indonesian office jobs are not behind.
What it means: the gap is between kinds of jobs, not between countries. Pick the kind of job, and you pick your clock.
Same region, different rules for who gets hired
We pulled the full text of every archived ad we could read across Southeast Asia: 106,532 of them. Since ChatGPT, this is what the ads in each country say.
Thailand and Indonesia write age into the ad. The Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia almost never do.
| Country | Ads | Age rule | Gender stated | Remote or hybrid | CapCut | TikTok | English | Mandarin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Indonesia | 23,706 | 14.5% | 27.0% | 3.0% | 1.4% | 4.9% | 13.7% | 1.8% |
| Thailand | 8,522 | 44.0% | 30.7% | 1.7% | 0.9% | 3.8% | 19.9% | 6.8% |
| Vietnam | 1,264 | 13.3% | 5.6% | 5.7% | 2.1% | 9.5% | 37.0% | 3.3% |
| Philippines | 3,357 | 0.0% | 0.6% | 15.7% | 0.0% | 1.5% | 23.6% | 0.7% |
| Malaysia | 6,023 | 0.2% | 0.6% | 6.4% | 4.2% | 6.9% | 29.9% | 18.6% |
| Singapore | 1,793 | 0.1% | 0.3% | 6.4% | 0.4% | 1.6% | 10.8% | 4.9% |
| Myanmar | 1,605 | 0.8% | 3.0% | 0.9% | 1.3% | 3.2% | 34.1% | 2.1% |
Remote work stayed where English is the work language. 15.7% of Philippine ads and 6.4% of Malaysian ads mention remote or hybrid work. In Indonesia, 3.0%.
Thailand's job ads learned Chinese. Indonesia's did not. On Thailand's biggest board, ads asking for Mandarin or Chinese rose from 2.1% in 2020 to 7.4% in 2026, from 365 different employers. In Indonesia, despite the nickel and EV boom, it has stayed near 2% on every board.
What it means: the rules that keep people out of a job are a choice each country makes, not a law of the market. If you are over 30 or under-connected, the boards and employers that hire across borders are the more open door.
The web developer job shrank. The stack did not die.
We took every Indonesian office-board ad with a software, data, IT, QA or DevOps title: 1,800 before ChatGPT and 2,187 after. Then we set them against global startup ads on the same before-and-after cut.
Fewer web developer ads, newer tools inside them
| Tool | Before → after | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Growing | ||
| Next.js (web developer ads) | 1.5% → 6.5% | Clear rise |
| Tailwind (web developer ads) | 0.5% → 5.5% | Clear rise |
| Power BI | 0.9% → 2.9% | Rising on 2 of 3 boards checked |
| Azure | 3.2% → 5.3% | Rising on 3 of 5 boards checked |
| Figma | 2.4% → 4.6% | Rising on all 3 boards checked |
| PostgreSQL | 8.0% → 10.5% | Pooled rise |
| CI/CD | 5.2% → 8.2% | Pooled rise |
| Kubernetes | 3.4% → 5.1% | Pooled rise |
| Fading | ||
| jQuery (web developer ads) | 14.0% → 9.5% | Leaning down |
| React (all tech ads) | 16.2% → 11.0% | Mostly fewer web jobs, not React dying |
| PHP (all tech ads) | 14.3% → 9.7% | Same: 32.9% → 28.0% inside web developer ads |
| SVN | 2.3% → 0.9% | Git won |
| AI in the ad | ||
| Generative AI or LLMs | 0.0% → 1.3% | 24 employers |
| LangChain, RAG or vector databases | 0.0% → 0.7% | |
| AI coding tools (Copilot, Cursor) | 0.0% → 0.4% | 9 employers |
Abroad, the job description itself changed. In global startup ads, large language models went from 0.03% to 10.41% and AI agents from 0.01% to 7.21%. "End-to-end" rose from 1.98% to 7.48%, "founding engineer" from 0.88% to 5.08%, ownership from 3.64% to 9.77%. Java fell from 8.69% to 3.76% and PHP from 2.74% to 1.02%.
Indonesia has not followed yet. Java held at 16.2% → 14.0% and Docker rose. Startups abroad now ask for one engineer who ships a whole product with AI. Indonesian ads still mostly ask for a stack.
Your move: keep the stack, modernise it (TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind, PostgreSQL, CI/CD, one cloud). Then add what local ads barely ask for yet and global ads now do: ship one small product end to end with an LLM inside it. In Indonesia that skill is still rare in the ads, which is exactly why it stands out.
Almost nobody prints what the AI jobs pay.
Our archive has no salary field, so we read pay from the ad text itself: the first monthly figure in the local currency. Most ads print none. The ones that do are not a random sample, so read every number here as "ads that print pay", not the whole market.
The AI premium is invisible
| Market | Earlier | Latest | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Philippines, white-collar board | 0.6% (2019) | 6.3% (2024) | Ten times more open about pay |
| Indonesia, biggest office board | 0.5% (2022) | 1.9% (2025) | Rising, still rare |
| Singapore, office board | 29.0% (2019) | 20.9% (2026) | Less open than before |
| Thailand, general board | 6.6% (2019) | 3.3% (2026) | Less open than before |
Where we can measure pay, it rose a little, before inflation. On the Singapore office board, which prints pay most often, the median printed monthly pay went from S$2,800 to S$3,000 (+7.1%, 2,134 ads before and 258 after). Tech titles there paid 40.0% more than other titles before ChatGPT and 31.7% more after. Elsewhere the samples are too small, or the intervals overlap.
A falling median can mislead. On one Indonesian office board, the median printed pay went from Rp 5.0M to Rp 3.0M. That is not a pay cut. Before ChatGPT, the few ads with pay were mostly office and tech jobs in big cities. Now shop, sales and regional jobs print pay far more often, and they pay less.
Your move: ask for the pay range before the first interview, every time. Employers who add AI to the job description almost never say what it pays, so the premium is yours to negotiate, not theirs to announce.
When the box opened
The lid opened in December 2022, and for 14 months nothing came out
For a full year after ChatGPT, no Indonesian ad in our archive asked for it. The first came in February 2024. In 2026 it is about 1 in 160 ads, and about 1 in 40 on the most white-collar board. Global startup ads are far ahead, at about 1 in 11.
The break is real: tested against 24 fake break dates, the ChatGPT date beat all of them once two or more years of ads are in. But it is a slow climb, not a step. The share rose every year from 2024, and more than doubled in 2026.
What it means: few applicants can show real AI use, and few employers demand it yet. Showing it now makes you stand out rather than just meet the bar.
Two clocks in one country
In 2026, 2.36% of archived ads on the most white-collar board ask for generative AI. On a mass-market board, it is 0.12%. That is about 20 times apart, in the same country and the same year. Our live feed from August to October 2026 shows the same split: 0.87% on the white-collar board, 0.11% on the mass-market one.
What it means: "AI is changing jobs" is true for some Indonesian office work and close to false for most mass-market jobs, so far. Which clock you are on depends on the board you apply through.
Not the robot
The new toolkit is a phone app, not an AI model
Since ChatGPT launched, the tools that spread fastest through Indonesian job ads are Canva, CapCut and TikTok. In marketing and content ads on the office boards, Canva went from 1.2% to 9.3% and CapCut from 0% to 7.7%. The shift shows on all three boards we could read in full, mass market included. ChatGPT is in 0.2% of design ads.
For designers, the professional tools held: Photoshop is in 45% of design ads before and 46% after, and Illustrator in 37% and 36%. Canva did not push Photoshop out. It spread to everyone who is not a designer.
What it means: the skill that became standard in these years is making passable visuals and short videos fast, on a phone. That is the floor for marketing jobs now.
A new job grew: selling on camera
Ads for live-stream sales hosts went from 0.43% of office-board ads in 2022 to 2.6% in 2025. Content creator ads went from 0.9% (2021) to 2.3%. TikTok is now named in 24% of marketing ads.
What it means: the work that grew fastest is the work that is hardest to hand to a machine: being a person on screen that people trust.
The ad itself changed: more Indonesian, less English, back to the office
On the biggest office board, ads written in Indonesian went from 34% to 70%, and ads asking for English fell from 22% to 12%. The white-collar board moved the same way (English 28% to 23%). In English-language tech ads, "WFO" (work from office) went from 0.4% to 5.0% (476 ads from 286 employers name it). "Banking" more than doubled, and "code reviews" and "CI/CD pipelines" rose. Experience asked stayed at a median of two years.
What it means: English opens fewer doors in these ads than it did in 2021, and remote work is shrinking in tech. Banks and finance are where tech ads grew.
Job seekers list AI more than employers ask for it
On 814 CVs uploaded to lokerdollar.com, 1.4% list ChatGPT, against 0.1–0.2% of ads that ask for it. On both sides, Canva ranks above every AI tool. Our users lean toward tech and remote work, so read this as a ranking, not a ratio.
What it means: putting "ChatGPT" in a skills list is no longer rare among applicants. A line showing what you did with it still is.
The jobs that were meant to go first
In the myth, one thing stays in the box when everything else escapes: hope. In these ads, it is the jobs.
The jobs said to be most at risk are still hiring
The ILO rates clerical work as the most exposed to generative AI. In our archive, admin roles went from 4.1% of ads on the two big office boards in 2021 to 7.0% in 2025. Customer service rose from 1.3% to 1.7%. We tested whether jobs with high AI exposure lost ground against jobs with low exposure, such as retail, logistics and healthcare. Exposed jobs did lose share, but the slide started in 2022, before ChatGPT, while the biggest office board was moving down-market toward shop, kitchen and sales jobs.
What it means: nothing in these ads shows AI replacing office work at scale yet. If it is coming, it has not shown up in what employers post.
What did shrink: web developers and graphic designers
Web developer ads fell from 2.9% to 0.5%, and graphic designer ads from 4.6% to 1.8%. The web developer slide was under way by 2022 and steepest in 2023, the year of the tech-startup downturn. AI may be part of it. The timing points first to the money cycle.
What it means: the most visible losses so far hit the jobs closest to startups, not the jobs closest to ChatGPT.
Age limits outlived the government circular
On 28 May 2025 the Minister of Manpower asked employers to stop setting age limits, "good-looking" and marital-status requirements (circular M/6/HK.04/V/2025, advisory, not binding). We set the test before looking. On the biggest office board, 15.2% of ads set an age limit in the 12 months before and 16.2% in the 12 months after. On the white-collar board: 9.1% before, 7.9% after, a change smaller than most months show by chance. On an older mass-market board, 30–39% of ads set an age limit in every year from 2019 to 2023.
What it means: for older job seekers, age is still a bigger filter in these ads than AI.
Who is changing, and how
Banks set age limits nearly 5 times as often as tech, and still barely ask for AI
Each employer page on the two office boards carries an industry label. We read 11,586 of them and sorted every ad by its employer's label. In a check of 20 random labels, 17 were right. The boards labelled far more employers after ChatGPT than before, so we compare rates inside each sector, not how big each sector grew.
| Sector (office boards) | Asks for generative AI, after ChatGPT | Sets an age limit, from June 2025 | What moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tech and software | 1.10% | 4.7% | Asks for AI most, sets age limits least |
| Media and agencies | 0.60% | 6.9% | Canva 0.3% → 4.5%, CapCut 0.2% → 4.1%, TikTok 3.4% → 13.1% |
| Shops and consumer brands | 0.16% | 18.0% | CapCut 0.0% → 2.9% |
| Banking and finance | 0.12% | 21.9% | Jobs most exposed to AI rose from 25.6% to 33.0% of its ads |
| Manufacturing | 0.18% | 17.6% | |
| Hotels, food and drink | 0.00% of 1,491 ads | 17.9% | |
| Healthcare and pharma | 0.00% of 835 ads | 15.4% | |
| All office-board ads | 0.39% | 14.6% |
What it means: banks are hiring more of the very jobs AI is best at, yet almost never ask for AI, and they filter by age more than any other sector. Not one hotel, restaurant, hospital or pharma ad in our sample asked for generative AI. If you work in those sectors, your edge right now is the phone toolkit and English, not AI.
The world around these ads
What happened outside the ads, set against what we see in them. The outside figures are other people's research, linked in the source notes. The reading is ours.
The world's AI gap shows up inside Indonesia
The IMF puts AI exposure at about 60% of jobs in advanced economies, 40% in emerging markets and 26% in low-income countries.
After ChatGPT, global startup ads asked for generative AI about 22 times as often as Indonesian ads. Inside Indonesia, the white-collar board asks about 20 times as often as a mass-market board.
Read: The same slope that runs between rich and poor countries runs between office jobs and mass-market jobs in one country.
Indonesia's office ads are not far behind the US mainstream
On Indeed in the US, about 0.1% of postings mentioned generative AI in January 2024 and about 0.3% by early 2025.
In our Indonesian archive: 0.17% in 2024, 0.28% in 2025.
Read: Different boards and word lists, so read it as the same order of size, not a race. The gap that matters is with startups and tech, not with ordinary US jobs.
Writing and design were hit first, everywhere
On Upwork, writing jobs fell 2% and writers' earnings 5.2% after ChatGPT, with similar effects for image work after DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. Indonesian venture funding fell 62% year on year by Q3 2023, and GoTo cut about 1,300 jobs in November 2022.
Graphic designer ads fell from 4.6% to 1.8% and web developer ads from 2.9% to 0.5%.
Read: Two forces hit the same jobs at the same time, the startup bust and image and text AI, and job ads alone cannot separate them.
Beginners: hit in the US, not yet in these ads
In US payroll data, workers aged 22–25 in the most AI-exposed jobs saw a 16% relative fall in employment, through fewer hires rather than lower pay.
The experience Indonesian ads ask for stayed at a median of two years.
Read: Employers here are not yet writing beginners out of the ad. Ads cannot show who actually gets hired, so this is the question for our interviews.
A ban and a deal made a new job
Indonesia banned payments on social media in October 2023 and TikTok Shop closed. In December 2023 TikTok bought 75.01% of Tokopedia. By 2025 Indonesia was Southeast Asia's largest and fastest-growing video-commerce market, with 2.6 billion transactions, up 90%.
Live-stream host ads went from 0.43% to 2.6%. TikTok is named in 24% of marketing ads.
Read: Policy and one platform deal created more visible new work in these ads than ChatGPT did.
AI may be arriving inside the apps
Canva put its AI features, including a writing tool built on OpenAI, into the app as Magic Studio in October 2023.
Canva went from 1.2% to 9.3% of marketing ads, while ChatGPT stayed at 0.09%.
Read: Some of what employers call 'Canva' may already be AI work under an app's name. Ads cannot tell us which features they mean. That is a hypothesis for the interviews, not a finding.
A squeezed middle, and most work not in any ad
Indonesia's middle class shrank from 57.33 million people in 2019 to 47.85 million in 2024. In August 2025, 57.80% of workers were informal. Sritex laid off 11,025 textile workers between August 2024 and March 2025.
The biggest office board moved down-market and admin ads rose. Our archive covers only advertised, mostly formal jobs.
Read: The ads fit a market sliding toward lower-paid office and service work. AI's effect on the informal majority does not show up in job ads at all.
The law set the floor for age limits
In 2024 the Constitutional Court rejected a challenge to age limits in job ads (one judge dissented). The May 2025 circular is advice, not law.
Age limits stayed at about 1 in 6 ads on the biggest office board after the circular.
Read: Without a binding rule, the habit held.
Leaving needs English, staying needs it less
#KaburAjaDulu ("just leave first") went viral in February 2025 as young Indonesians talked about working abroad.
Ads asking for English on the biggest office board fell from 22% to 12%, and ads written in Indonesian rose from 34% to 70%.
Read: The two paths are pulling apart: the jobs at home ask less of your English, while the way out asks more.
Exposure is not loss
The ILO counts about one in four jobs worldwide as exposed to generative AI and only 3.3% in the highest group. Clerical work is the most exposed, and the ILO says exposure is not job loss.
Admin ads rose from 4.1% to 7.0%.
Read: Our data agrees with the ILO's own warning. Exposure tells you where change may come, not that the job goes.
Our forecasts, dated so you can check us
Nothing in these ads proves the change cannot be undone. That is a forecast, so we wrote ours down on 31 October 2026. We will check them against our live feed at the end of February 2027 and publish the result, right or wrong.
- The office clock speeds up. Ads on the white-collar board posted November 2026 to February 2027 that ask for generative AI: above 0.87%, the August–October level. Our central guess is 1.2%, with an 80% range of 0.9–2.0%.
- The mass-market clock stays slow. On the mass-market board over the same months, the share stays under 0.5%.
- The phone toolkit stays ahead of AI. In marketing and content ads, Canva and CapCut are each named more often than ChatGPT.
- 2026 ends higher than 2025. The archive's full-year 2026 Indonesian share ends above 0.6%.
One thing already looks one-way. Once a tool gets into job ads, it rarely leaves: Photoshop is still in 46% of design ads. Canva and CapCut were added to the list, not swapped in. AI is being added the same way. The bar only goes up.
What to do, by the job you want
Drawn from the findings above. Each move names the finding it rests on.
Admin and customer service: your job is still being posted
These ads ask for Excel, clear Indonesian and reliability. Keep those sharp. Add one AI tool for drafting replies and reports, and say how much time it saves you.
Marketing and content: CapCut, Canva and TikTok are the floor
Build a small portfolio of short videos and posts made on your phone. If you are comfortable on camera, live selling is the fastest-growing role in these ads.
Designers: keep the pro tools, add motion
Photoshop and Illustrator are still in more than a third of design ads. Premiere went from 13% to 19% and Figma from 10% to 12%. With fewer pure graphic-design ads, video and interface work widen your options.
Developers: follow the banks, show you work in a team
Web developer ads shrank. Banking, code reviews and CI/CD pipelines grew, and banks took a bigger share of office ads. Expect to work from the office more often than in 2021.
Everyone: prove AI use, don't just list it
"ChatGPT" in a skills list is now common on CVs. Write one line with a result, and bring one example you can show.
Over 30? Aim where age limits are rarest
Office boards set age limits in about 8–16% of ads, mass-market boards in a quarter to a third. Tech firms set them least, about a quarter as often as hotels, hospitals and factories. Apply anyway when you fit the job. The government circular backs you, even though it is not binding.
What we cannot say yet
We cannot measure how many jobs exist. Our live feed only goes back to 2026, and the Internet Archive saves some pages and boards more than others, so every finding compares shares within the same board, never raw counts.
Findings 04, 07 and 08 (job titles) came from looking at the data after our planned tests. They are leads to confirm. Findings 01, 03, 05 and 09 were tested by rules we wrote down before looking. Finding 10 (sectors) followed a method written down before the figures were read, including a rule not to compare sector sizes when label coverage differs by more than 10 points before and after; it does, so we compare rates only.
Whether this change is permanent is a forecast, not a finding. Part 5 says what we expect and when we will check.
Still to come before publication: interviews with recruiters and workers, a review of the method by a labour economist, and a second, independent reader for the hand-checked samples.
How we know
We read 118,545 job ads saved by the Internet Archive from five Indonesian job boards (two aimed at office jobs, two at the mass market, one small general board) and boards in neighbouring countries, from 2019 to October 2026. We analysed the full text of 106,532 of them. The older mass-market board's pages from 2024 on are incomplete, so it counts only through 2023; the newer one is archived only in 2026. About 12,700 pages saved in 2026 from two boards outside Indonesia held no ad, most likely expired postings, and are left out. Every figure is aggregated; we name no board in the findings, and we have no commercial relationship with any of them. Job types come from ad titles. AI exposure groups follow the ILO's 2025 occupational exposure index. Sectors come from the industry label the board prints on each employer's page.
Before analysing, we wrote down each question, the confounds (the 2022–23 tech downturn, archive gaps, changes in which boards and jobs are covered) and the result that would count as a yes. Rising and falling words were ranked by a standard method for comparing word use between two periods, within one language at a time. Each listed term had to appear across at least 10 employers, and the headline terms were checked by hand in context. One term failed that check and was dropped: "AI", which in design ads often means Adobe Illustrator.
For the generative-AI share, a blind second reading of 2,282 ads by Claude (run on the 30 October data) agreed with 99.7% of the ads our word list counted but found it misses about 3 in 10, so those shares are floors. Ranges are 95% intervals. Aggregate data and code will be released as open data. No ad text is published.
Outside figures in Part 5: IMF (January 2024), ILO and NASK (May 2025), Indeed Hiring Lab (2025), Hui, Reshef and Zhou (Organization Science, 2024), Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen (Stanford, November 2025), e-Conomy SEA 2025 (Google, Temasek, Bain), BPS, the Ministry of Manpower, and the Constitutional Court (decision 35/PUU-XXII/2024).
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- Job X-ray: 17 pekerjaan per papan, alat, AI, usia dan bahasa Inggris (CSV)
- Asia Tenggara: syarat dan keahlian per negara, sebelum dan sesudah (CSV)
- Sektor di papan kantor: AI, alat dan batas usia (CSV)
- Peran teknologi: alat yang disebut di iklan, sebelum dan sesudah (CSV)
- Gaji tertulis: seberapa sering iklan mencantumkan gaji, dan mediannya (CSV)
Kutip sebagai: Desman, K. (2026). Pandora's Box, Episode 1: Is your job still inside? LokerDollar Research. https://lokerdollar.com/en/research/pandoras-box-ep1-ai-job-ads-2026